Posts tagged with: US State Department

I attended an informative — and very moving — presentation yesterday on the humanitarian relief effort underway in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. The talk was given here in Grand Rapids by Mark Ohanian, director of programs for International Orthodox Christian Charities (see my podcast with him here). What I learned was that despite the massive scale of human suffering, the crisis is likely to get much worse. Given the gains that the Islamic State is making in Iraq, that might be a safe prediction.

Ohanian said that the relief effort in Syria, where IOCC works alongside Red Crescent and other principal agencies, is made more difficult and expensive because of the breakdown in Syrian society and the need to import so much of the supplies. The video above shows how entrepreneurial Syrians are already starting businesses in the refugee camps to help themselves.

If you want to offer direct help the refugees, you can make a donation on the IOCC site here. IOCC, in partnership with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, serves all refugees regardless of religion or ethnicity. (more…)

As reported here last week, the US State Department has released its 2013 “Trafficking In Persons” or Tip Report. In it, China has been reduced to a Tier 3 ranking, the lowest ranking a nation can receive. That means the nation is doing little or nothing to comply with international laws regarding the trafficking of persons.

According to the Population Research Institute, the State Department acknowledges that China’s one-child policy (which is directly linked to gendercide) has heavily influenced that nation’s sex trafficking:

The State Department acknowledged the one-child policy as the ‘key source of demand’ for sex-trafficking and forced prostitution within the country, but remained silent regarding the abolition of the harmful policy in its list of policy recommendations for China.

The one-child policy came into effect in 1979 in an attempt to stabilize the country’s population. Now, a generation later, the policy has caused sex-selective abortion and infanticide within the country on a gargantuan scale. Due to the policy, there are currently 37,000,000 more males than females in China– that’s about the entire population of California.

The one-child policy created the shortage of females which currently fuels the demand for prostitution and sex-trafficking within China.

The State Department has chosen not to pressure China regarding its one-child policy; instead, the Obama administration is considering sanctions against China, but no recommendations have yet been made.